


Not Our Sky

by Unpretty



Category: Firefly
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 11:45:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4178595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unpretty/pseuds/Unpretty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An alternate universe where the war was not actually for independence, despite what browncoats might want people to believe, and Reavers are not the merciless monsters those same browncoats make them out to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Our Sky

Fire and blood and pain.

_It was her very first ballet recital. She was nervous, so nervous, but she did her best to move as weightlessly and gracefully as her instructor had taught her. Her parents sat in the front row, but she didn't care what they thought – she cared about her brother, who was too young to care about things like ballet but watched her rapt all the same. She wanted to be beautiful and she wanted to be perfect, and she wanted him to tell her that she was_.

The wailing of sirens, of alarms, a godawful wailing but at least the screams had stopped.

_The ground was hot and the stars were bright. Silent Ones were coming for the Walkers, to share walking things and silent words. The people did not know why the Walkers tolerated it, and the Walkers could not explain. There were many things the Walkers could not explain. Parts of the people were curious, so curious, but they tried not to think these things because the dissonance was painful._

She woke up gasping for air that she should not have been able to breathe, and blood poured from her mouth like lies. Pain, but the pain was a distant and intermittent thing, and she wasn't sure if she could feel it all. Not pain the way she had known pain, not the pain of _en pointe_ or of separation. Blood everywhere, and her skin didn't fit right.

She should have been dead, she realized, if she'd still been human she would have been dead. But she wasn't human anymore, wasn't a person, was something else–

_"Since when are you so opposed to charity?"_

_"Charity is feeding the hungry, this – this is just reckless."_

_"We are feeding the hungry. Sort of. We’re bringing food, and letters from their families."_

_"They don't – they aren't human anymore, they don't have families. You're not doing anything but giving those people false hope. You're going to get – do you know what they do, to girls like you? They'll try to turn you if you're lucky, if you're unlucky–"_

She'd never believed it. Never thought she believed it, the stories of murderous rape gangs and cannibals. But in her heart, deep down, she'd always been afraid. She was trying to conquer her fear, and instead she died.

No. She wasn't dead. She refused to be dead, refused to accept this.

Panic, panic that wasn't entirely her own, because to reject symbiosis once it had already begun meant death for the both of them, the one that they had become.

She dragged herself upward, still bleeding, bones still knitting themselves together into something stronger. There was a pile of meat beside her, and part of her – _her, the real her, the real me_ – remembered that this meat used to be a friend of hers. It was meat now, nothing but meat, it had not even silent words and it was fuel to help her heal. It was taking too long, she hadn't accepted herself yet, and the longer she took the more it would hurt.

She needed to find more Walkers, needed to find them before the pain of separation became too much. The ship had been miles away from the nearest pack when it crashed, and the sooner she could find them–

No. She wouldn't. She wouldn't be a Walker, she wouldn't join them. Her brother, oh, her brother was waiting for her on the outpost, waiting for her to return. She needed to go home, she needed to see her parents, she needed to sleep in her soft bed and pack her things for college. Her mind, the old parts of her mind found ugly words for the Walkers, and the revulsion of her new mind made her head ache worse than it already did.

Why had she come here, thinking such ugly things? Satin and tulle and dancing and silent words, what could those things matter now? As she dragged herself into the fine dust outside the wreckage, she could see for the first time the stars – how they roiled and rolled in the sky, how bright they burned. The meat of her old life made the air smell sweet, and her old mind recoiled from this awareness.

The ground was hot and the stars were bright, and Walkers were waiting for her, Walkers who would speak to her properly for the first time, Walkers who would know her and her new body, Walkers to feed her and lay with her. Who could care about Silent Ones, when there were such wonders to be had?

Her brother. Her brother was waiting for her. She wouldn't leave him, she wouldn't leave her life, she wouldn't leave her perfect life to become a–

It hurt, the old words and the old thoughts hurt, and it hurt more as she pulled herself to her feet. She couldn't move like this yet, shouldn't, not if she hadn't even eaten. No amount of pain or anger would get rid of her new mind, nothing would let her go back to the way she was. She would have been dead, would have been meat, if a person had not been kind enough to join with her.

Every inch was a battle, and the only advantage of her old mind was that it was more familiar with her body and the way it moved. Even so, it was a strange thrill to be walking, to see the world with human eyes from so high off the ground. A battle, anyway, because every inch she walked further from the Walkers made her head ache worse, brought the agony of separation. It became almost unbearable, sometimes, and the only thing that kept her going was the memory of her brother's face.

But how could that be fair? How, when she had just as many memories of the mountains, of the ground, of the joy of being a part of something? How could any one thing be worth this aching loneliness, this awful quietude?

She thought of her brother, just the same, bloody feet making tracks in the dirt.

Time was a strange idea, and the old parts of her mind weren't enough to make it fit right, and so she lost it. They were shocked, anyway, to see her mangled body walk into the outpost on its own two feet. She tried to ask for her brother, but she'd had neither water nor meat, and her body needed both.

What was this noise, this awful noise? Not their silent words, words she could now hear even with her new self–

Thoughts, she was hearing thoughts, fear and horror. Words, real words, but Silent Ones should not have been able to share them, this was wrong, this was all wrong. She needed to accept her new self, she needed to get away from this old life, this was going to break her to even try.

Her brother. He was so happy to see her, she was so happy to see him, it almost made the pain of separation go away. She drank in all his joyous words, and it took a moment to process the silent words that accompanied them.

"–I told them, I _told_ them you couldn't be dead, I would have known if you were dead–"

"Water," she croaked, her first words – _no, not her first, not dead_ – and when he brought it she drank an entire pitcher.

"You need to get her the hell outta here."

She and her brother both turned toward the voice, and when he tried to confront the sheriff she grabbed her brother's hand, because to be separated would be to allow the agony to return. He was angry, but her face was flat, the ongoing rejection left her no real room to feel. Everything was noise and pain, and her brother, he was an oasis.

"Excuse me? My sister needs medical attention–"

"Bull _shit_ she does. You get her on a horse, you send her back to the desert."

"I will do no such thing, I am a _doctor_ and I _demand_ to see your medical facilities."

"Lookit her!" he roared, and though her brother recoiled she did not. "She oughta be dead, why you think she ain't? She got _turned_ , she's a Reaver now."

They both recoiled at that, at the ugly words both silent and not, ugliness even in her brother's mind. How could she love someone whose words were so ugly, about someone who would reject who she was?

Because she rejected it, too.

"I'm not a Reaver," she said quietly, not quite hiding behind her brother.

"She's a _Reaver_ ," the sheriff repeated, "an' she's rejectin' her spider. You need to send her back out there afore they come for her. And they _will_ come for her."

"I'm _not_ ," she repeated, clinging to her brother's coat. "I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm _not_."

"So this is the kind of outpost you run," her brother sneered, "that would send a – a _little girl_ , out there with those things?"

"She _is_ one o' those things," the sheriff hissed through his teeth, "an' you don't send her back out there, you're gonna start a goddamn war. You think she's the first one took a while to take?"

"I want to go home," she moaned into her brother's back, and he turned to take her in his arms, still glaring daggers at the sheriff.

"I'll find a way to fix this," he said, and he believed it. "We're going to fix this and I'm going to take you home. One way or another, River – I'm taking you home."

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this last year and never got around to crossposting it, but this AU's been on my mind again, so.


End file.
